Sunday, February 13, 2011

A Dream Of Waking?

On Thursday morning, something very strange happened. I had just woken but hadn't got up yet, when I experienced a state of mental clarity unlike and discontinuous with normal waking consciousness. In that state, I knew exactly what was going on in the world and why. I knew precisely what to do and how. Had I been able to hold on to the state, I could have explained it with no trouble at all. Unfortunately, it lasted for a few seconds only, and then it was gone. I knew that I'd had the experience, but that's all. I couldn't remember what I had known.

It was not the first time this has happened. There's never any warning, but it usually happens when I'm in a contemplative frame of mind or shortly after waking. In retrospect, it feels very much like a period of weeks before I left Vancouver. Almost every day, I woke up with the certainty that only seconds before, I had known the answers to all my most important questions, but I had zero recall of what they had been. It was intensely frustrating.

This most recent experience was the most dramatic. I was fully awake when it occurred and I have absolutely no doubt that it was real. It occupied my mind for most of that day and the next. The most striking thing about it was it's discontinuity with waking consciousness. The best analogy my intuition could provide was, that it was to waking consciousness as waking consciousness is to dreams.

It is not unusual to remember one's dreams when awake, but one never remembers one's waking life while dreaming. The memory traffic goes in only one direction. Still, it sometimes happens that waking consciousness manifests within dream reality. That would be the definition of a lucid dream, and that's very much what this was like, being lucid while awake. Another difference between waking and dreaming is their relative orderliness. From the perspective of waking consciousness, dreams appear very disorderly, chaotic and unstable. And yet, once awake, it is possible to make sense of the dream's meaning and see the source of it's contents in one's waking life. A sense of transcendent orderliness was present when I was in the state I experienced as well.

I'm starting to strongly suspect that there is a third state that is to waking as waking is to dreaming (and maybe others beyond it). What I find funny is, if there is such a state, then we've been living in it all our lives and just don't remember. Also, if the analogy to dreaming is sound, we probably spend far more "time" there than we do here. I haven't got as far as knowing what to make of all this. I would greatly appreciate any ideas and input about it and it's implications. I hope it happens again. It was a beautiful experience, even though it's specific content was lost. If it does, I'll post an update in the comments.
In Lak'ech.

9 comments:

Maybe you had a brief experience of syntony (the right and left hemispheres of the brain working as an integral whole). Supposedly, if we humans could learn to do it, we would have access to all knowledge, just pull it from the cosmos.

Thanks for that suggestion, Bill. It would be great if that's what it was, since that would offer the possibility of it becoming a permanent mode of functioning. I immediately thought of Carl Calleman's theory about hemispheric dominance. He proposed that the end of the Long Count in 2012 would end an age of generalised left-brain dominance in humans and begin one of generalised whole brain integration. If he's right, and if that's what it's like, that's very good news for all of us!I tried searching for more information on syntony and whole-brain integration, but I was unable to find much of anything, and no experiential accounts. Do you know where I could find that sort of information? How did you hear about it?In Lak'ech.

I suggest going to this site and reading some of the articles pertaining to this subject.

http://ervinlaszlo.com/

I believe the Manifestations of God like Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and for me Bahá'u'lláh had 100% syntony, thus their Revelations were not from human learning but innate knowledge from the Cosmos.

In relation to the new race of beings here is a quote from the Master from the late 19th century:

“The world in the past has been ruled by force, and man has dominated woman by reason of his more forceful and aggressive qualities both of body and mind. But the balance is already shifting—force is losing its weight and mental alertness, intuition and the spiritual qualities of love and service, in which woman is strong, are gaining ascendancy. Hence the new age will be an age less masculine, and more permeated with the feminine ideals—or, to speak more exactly, will be an age in which the masculine and feminine elements in civilisation will be more evenly balanced.”–’Abdu’l-Bahá

Interesting you mention this! When did you notice this state for the first time? I'm asking because I remember those states from when I was a baby. Only few people seem to remember, but I suspect that many experience it.

Hi Defer. If you mean the full lucidity, I only remember this one occurrence. I can't recall anything at all before the age of 5. Maybe a different state of consciousness prevailed until then. I hadn't thought of that as a possible reason for the total amnesia. Thanks.

I would call the third state you describe "divine consciousness", the consciousness of the eternal being (as opposed to the mundane and transient consciousness of the ego). In my experience, divine consciousness happens spontaneously at times, and can be induced by psychedelic drugs, but can only be achieved at will - that is, as and when we want - through meditation and clean living, whereby the divine being (the soul) regains control of the mind from the ego.

Divine consciousness is always there in the background. We simply have to eliminate the foreground noise of the ego. Much easier said than done!